When an aircraft is in flight, an important factor that impacts the flight is hazardous weather, such as icing, turbulence, storms, lightning, and the like. If there is not correct detection of all kinds of bad weather, the aircraft can be subjected to severe damage with possibly disastrous results.
At present, weather radar equipped on many aircraft is used to detect weather conditions along a flight path. Current weather radar systems are provided for use in single aircraft, with the sensed weather data not known by other aircraft.
In recent years, the connected radar concept has been proposed as the evolution of current weather radar systems. In a connected radar system, the weather information is downloaded from or uploaded to the aircraft. This weather information may then be widely re-used by other aircraft during flight. In proposed connected radar systems, a data transmission algorithm is used to request weather information from aircraft, and then the aircraft transmits the weather data to a ground station. In the defined algorithm, aircraft position is always associated to each weather data packet. This means the aircraft position element is sent every time a weather data packet is transmitted, increasing the burden on an already limited frequency bandwidth.